BELLEFONTE — Bob Baylor, once a wayward missionary, wandered into Happy Valley in August 1976, after being recruited by pastor David K. Hertzler to help launch the Centre County Christian Academy.

It took weeks of prodding for Hertzler to convince Baylor to take the position. Baylor finally accepted, expecting the job to be a short-term engagement from which he would move on to other callings.

Thirty-five years later, Baylor is retiring as the academy’s president, having stuck around long enough to have overseen the school’s establishment as a viable educational alternative in the county.

“I would have never guessed, when I came to Centre County, that I would be here for 35 years,” Baylor said. “But I don’t regret any of it.”

Baylor was born in West Virginia but grew up in Florida, the son of a state park superintendent. At 18, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. After finishing his service five years later, Baylor came home to find his sister, an attendee of a Florida Christian school, praying for him. Baylor became curious about God and, within weeks, he found himself kneeling with the pastor of his sister’s church, being “born again” as a believer of Jesus Christ.

Baylor soon enrolled at Bob Jones University, a Christian college in South Carolina, where he met his eventual wife, Dottie, and became a personal friend of university President Bob Jones Jr. After school, Baylor and his wife spent four years working at the Panama City Christian School in Florida, then moved to the Bahamas to lead the Nassau Christian Schools for three years.

Arriving back in the states, Baylor began searching for his next job. Unbeknownst to him, Jones had learned about Hertzler’s fledgling effort to launch a Christian school and recommended Baylor for an administrative role.

“Pastor Hertzler continued to call me and ask me to come and take a look,” Baylor said. “Finally, we came up and took a look at the place, and felt this was what the Lord would have us to do. It seemed very clear to me these guys needed some help.”

Despite heavy recruiting efforts, the school started its first year with only five students.

“At that point it was getting a little discouraging,” Baylor said.

Not having a permanent campus was also a problem. For its first three years, the school functioned out of the former First Baptist Church, located where Centre Crest is today.

Then the tide turned. Enough money was raised to purchase land at 100 Hertzler Drive in Bellefonte, where the school stands today. And the academy received a great boost when WBLF announcer (and future Bellefonte mayor) Jim Kerschner broadcast a couple of commentaries on the school.

“That really got our name out, and word of mouth began to spread,” Baylor said. “We did an open house that spring and had about 130 to 140 people show up.”

Thanks to the boost in enrollment, the school broadened its program to include kindergarten through 12th grades. It reached its high-water mark in 1984, with 232 students enrolled.

“I would say that of the community that we came to serve, there was a strong spiritual sensitivity, a strong desire to see their children grow up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord,” Baylor said.

Now, at age 71, Baylor says he’s accomplished what he set out to do with the school. Baylor talks with pride about the students who have graduated from the academy and gone on to become missionaries and pastors, those he says “have a heart toward the things of the Lord.”

“Our goal was prepare our students to do whatever it was God wanted them to do,” Baylor said. “We have done that.”

Baylor will step down at the end of June. Troy Kerstetter, the head of the school’s board of trustees and pastor at the Faith Baptist Church in Blanchard, will step in temporarily as acting president until a replacement is found.

The time is right for a change, Baylor said. Enrollment has shrunk since the academy’s heyday — the school had just 30 students last year — and Baylor said he believes new leadership might help revive interest.

“We need fresh blood in to move the school forward,” Baylor said. “That’s not as easily done as said.”

The school’s active approach toward confronting perceived faults in its students’ behavior can be divisive, Baylor admitted. But that’s not something he apologizes for.

“If a character flaw bubbles to the surface here, we can’t afford not to deal with it. Sometimes dealing with it is where rubber meets the road, and that friction can cause a lot of problems. That’s probably the give and take of Christian education. I happen to think it’s a positive because it does in fact teach young people how to live, and know there’s somebody they’re accountable to,” Baylor said.

Good character, in Baylor’s opinion, can be learned — in fact, must be learned — in the school environment.

“I’m far more concerned about their character and what kind of person they are than their academic standing,” Baylor said. “Otherwise, all you’re doing is preparing a clever devil. If they don’t know how to use the knowledge they have in a productive way, then you’ve wasted an awful lot of time preparing someone who perhaps is not going to do the right thing with the information that they have.”

In the short term, Baylor plans to do some traveling with Dottie, who is retiring as supervisor of the academy’s elementary school, and spending more time with his family. His three children, all graduates of the school their father ran, live nearby, and his first grandchild is set to begin his time at the academy next year.

“You don’t know what tomorrow brings, but God does. Our responsibility is to determine that plan and when you find out what it is, to act on it,” Baylor said. “Though my plan at this point is ambiguous, I’m confident the Lord has something in store for us — that another door will open.”

Cliff White can be reached at 235-3928.